The Importance Of Good User Experience
Every day we see incredible new things coming out, and none of it is possible without software. Why then, do we deal with such crappy software on a daily basis?
The problem I’ve seen has always stemmed from the small details of building software. No matter how simple something should be, there are edge cases. And it’s how you handle the edge cases (if at all) that makes the difference. We’ve not put much emphasis on the importance of good user experience.
Now on the other hand, extravagant solutions to common user experience problems isn’t right either. You should be spending your time on the important parts of your product, not fiddling with the forgotten password flow for hours upon end. But it should still be smooth, and if things go wrong, but extremely welcoming to support requests.
Take some time this week to focus on the small problems.
Are users seeing long response times on your web application? Maybe they are uploading files or querying for reports. If so, do them a favor and intercept button clicks with javascript and disable the button. It’s nothing much, but it tells the user something is happening more than just a tiny spinning circle in their browser tab. You could even go the extra mile and set a timeout for 5 or 10 seconds later to let the user know it’s still working.
At this point, we’re more than capable about handling these situations easily. It’s not hard to make these tweaks, but the reason we don’t is because we are lazy. It’s not the most fun to build this functionality on every application you build. Once you’ve put a day or two into building a few enhancements you will start feeling a lot more better about your application as a whole. It feels more robust. It is more robust.
The best way to feel confident about your product is to go through and make a bunch of small UX tweaks like these and ship them. This is the reason people love Github over Bitbucket. Zappos over other shoe sites. Apple over other hardware manufactures. They really value good user experience. The attention to detail is there. Is yours?